August 30, 2008

All the way from Reno

I've got me a new toy :-)

I'm not going to rhapsodize on how great it is just now, nor wax lyrical on how amazing it is to have so much screen real estate (24" is a pretty big diagonal) for such a small footprint, because that'd be just boring (not that whatever else I might write about would be considered worth interrupting the evening news for) but yeah, as I was about to say before these tiny digressions...

I suspect my carbon credit karma is sinking like a stone. I've been buying quite a few things (from books to kitchen appliances and electrical extension cords) via websites like Amazon.com, and tracking my packages has shown me that those items come from all over the US. But the iMac takes the biscuit in terms of distance travelled.

If you look closely at the iMac's screen in the picture (click it to view a larger version) you can see the complete track it followed across the country -- indeed, across the continent. Its journey started in San Jose, California -- and it's tough to go much further West in the 48 contiguous states (which conveniently rules out Alaska, but it's too cold up there to maintain powerhouses of geek innovation anyway) -- then quickly proceeded through Sacramento, CA to Reno, Nevada. After that there was only desert for a long while, literally and metaphorically. From that Thursday to the next Tuesday, not a tidbit of update to be had on the tracker until my brave little iMac reached the next Fedex waystation at Willington in Connecticut. Willingwhere? Yeah, me neither. Whatever. It's a long way from Reno (as I'm sure R.E.M. would agree). But from there it was just a quick couple of hops to me in Newton, here on the edge of the East coast.

I was a bit surprised that it came all the way from California, when we have such a huge Apple Store here in Boston (and plenty of little satellite ones), but mine was a bit of a custom job -- I asked for a few extra features, while I was at it -- so I guess only the bog-standard configurations are available here, and customizations are done exclusively at "the mothership".

Incidentally, that desk setup is only temporary. I'm expecting some desk extension parts from IKEA sometime soon. I just hope they don't come all the way from Sweden!